The field of the disclosure relates generally to wiring system design and documentation, and more specifically, to systems and methods for airplane electrical system connection routing and visualization with topology determination.
Certain traditional manufacturing enterprises are moving their business model to that of a large-scale systems integrator. As such, there is a need for systems and methods that verify wiring system designs developed by suppliers. As an example, aircraft wiring systems present unique challenges in terms of scale, spatial requirements, and the number of interfaces. For a typical aircraft, the wiring system design definition is scattered across multiple product data managers (PDMS).
One problem with such an arrangement is that system designers need to be able to visualize the physical design as represented by three-dimensional geometric data and any related non-geometric data in order to verify and validate wiring systems configurations. Currently, this problem is addressed using physical mockups (which are sometimes referred to as an iron-bird), prototype construction, and paper engineering requirements and/or drawings. These solutions are labor intensive and consume many man hours that could be better applied elsewhere.
The three-dimensional wire harness models on one known aircraft program include wire harness installation (WHI) models and wire harness assembly (WHA) models. The WHI and WHA models contain geometric harness data but do not contain logical wire content. Instead it is a harness end item (HEI) that includes the logical wire content for the harnesses. Because these three model types are separate, it is difficult to determine the wire routes in the three-dimensional space of the airplane. It is believed that no complete three-dimensional wiring topology for airplanes or other complex platforms has ever been created. More specifically, no precise three dimensional description that is both graphically represented and textually representative of each individual wire detail such as size, type, material, gauge, signal, and amperage has been completely described. Instead, as described above, a complete physical mockup of the wiring systems was created and installation drawings were created to substitute for the wiring topology on the platform.